public services

If you love the feeling of cruising down a brand-new stretch of highway, the last few years have been full of good news for you.

And if you're in the business of designing and overseeing the construction work on those highways, well, these are banner years indeed.

If you're a citizen on the hook to pay for that roadwork, though, the picture isn't quite as pretty.

While the drop in oil prices is sure to take its toll, road building in Saskatchewan has been booming lately. The Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure (MHI) had record-high budgets in 2009 and 2010, and every budget since has been larger than 2009's record-breaker.

The February 18, 2015 edition of the Globe and Mail featured an article by the paper's B.C. correspondent Gary Mason, which in part drew favourable attention to B.C.'s debt-to-GDP ratio in comparison with that of Ontario.

On face value, B.C.'s reported debt-to-GDP ratio calculated from its most recent audited statements of 18.2 per cent looks pretty good compared with the ratio for the same time period reported for Ontario of 38.4 per cent. Unfortunately, a fair comparison of the positions of the two provinces is not as straightforward as it might seem.

For the past 30 years, our governments, in collusion with the business sector, have been trying to sell us a bill of goods about how their coffers are empty, how they must cut down the size of the state and how they cannot afford the cost of our public services anymore. Therefore, they are obliged to cut their expenditures in order to balance the budget and to eliminate the deficit.

In other words, their hands are tied.

However, what they are not telling us is that we have alternatives to their measures of austerity, which have been discredited by the major economists around the world, notably by Joseph Stiglitz, economist and Nobel Prize winner, who warns against such cuts, which do nothing but aggravate the economic situation and lead to recession.

The B.C. Finance Ministry has produced a report much more critical of Partnerships BC and its activities around public-private partnerships (P3s) than might have been expected by a province so committed to the practice. It raises issues of conflict of interest, dubious practices and questionable assumptions in the multi-billion-dollar program. The story has received no media coverage.

While it is likely the province will continue to push P3s with undiminished enthusiasm for large projects, the report and surrounding documents acknowledge many of the criticisms of P3s raised by other groups including both the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the B.C. Construction Association.

Premier Jim Prentice says he intends to "reform" Alberta’s public service, fix its low morale, reverse its "shocking" turnover and deal with its other "very significant problems."

He's appointed a former senior federal civil servant and well-connected business professor to be his "agent of change," along with a couple of right-hand persons to assist with this change agentry. Their work will start immediately.

Sounds way better, huh, than former premier Alison Redford's heavy-handed war on the Alberta civil service?